Could a kind soul enlighten me with a recommendation for a decent CMS which can be used to create new Web portal for our research group?

A little background. For the past 10 years our group has being using DaisyCMS which is heavily customized. About 4-5 years ago an upgrade was attempted but between Apache Cocoon, XML files in CVS, and MySQL tables upgrade went nowhere. People who have done original set up have move on long time ago and the only interesting part about their installation is clever use of Xen DomU and hot migration abilities of Xen hypervisor to bring web site back on the minute notice in the case of the crash.

Anyhow people who are lurking on FreeBSD forums have noticed several of my posts made out of frustration.

First why FreeBSD when I am OpenBSD user? Unfortunately we are not so rich to have separate physical server for every tiny web application. So since I have to use virtualization I opted for Jails. Second reason is that I want to use ZFS in particularly cloning and replication abilities to have essentially redundant installation of the web portal.

Another requirement is that it uses normal web server Nginx comes to mind and a PostgreSQL database. My personal preference would be flat files (people know that I run few PmWiki websites) but I was overruled which I didn't mind as long as I can use PostgreSQL.

After a small frustrating stint with Django-CMS (BTW we use Django for many in-house project so that was our first choice). I gave up on it due to the lack of proper FreeBSD specific documentation

BTW the person who is actually "doing the website for us" knows little bit HTML and CSS and is an artist with the most recent project done in WordPress. So I will have to do all the dirty work. We are also taking this very serious and external hosting is not an option because we are making bits of proprietary code, papers, and datasets downloadable to people with the right credentials (teaser). We are not putting that stuff on anybody's server.

How good is your PHP? How much of the project do you intend or have time for implementing yourself? I hesitate using anything that makes you dependent on the CMS' developers. Excessively moving targets or dormant development at both extremes.

How much do you trust your own security practices? Are you looking for something already well hardened with a good history?

How complex of a CMS are you talking about?

If someone has has a golden suggestion, please chime in to help this good man out.

I can uncomment lines in PmWiki configuration files. Once I even added and edited few lines. No I don't know PHP.

Quote:

Originally Posted by fn8t

How much of the project do you intend or have time for implementing yourself?

I and all my colleges have a full time job/duties. This is basically meant to be done off hours which is perfectly doable if all people in the room are adults. However I am getting an impression that I am the only one living on the planet Earth when it comes to this project and everyone else is an Extraterrestrial.

Quote:

Originally Posted by fn8t

How much do you trust your own security practices? Are you looking for something already well hardened with a good history?

How complex of a CMS are you talking about?

Personally I think that a small/medium academic lab like hours should have a very simple website with possibly minimal CMS capabilities. If the lab was mine I would start by trying to modify PmWiki default installation to see if it can be used. I concure that PmWiki might be the wrong code base but it is simple enough to try.

In the mean time I evaluated Djanog-CMS, Plone, Drupal, Joomla besides few others that I was familiar from before.

I am 100% that whatever is selected should be minimal modified (colours possibly custom CSS) and deployed with well tested modules. Anybody who thinks we will develop our custom modules and code for exiting CMS which have couple hundred thousands lines of code should roll up his/her sleeves.

Since yesterday my personal front runner is Joomla. The only grouch I have with vanilla 4.3.1 is that I don't see I can use PostgreSQL with it. It is either a bug or PostgreSQL was only experimental feature added to 3.xxx release which was dropped in the mean time.

Thought and played little bit more than I should have with Drupal7 and Joomla. Some observation. It is very difficult to create web sites with Drupal7 and Joomla. It might be useful to a corporations but creating a simple website is a royal pain.

I further evaluated some Wiki software which could be used as CMS. Came down to two Tiki Wiki (monolitic written in PHP) and Foswiki (a free fork of TWiki) modular written in Perl.

I really like Foswiki and that would be my personal choice now. These are serious websites built with Foswiki

Thought and played little bit more than I should have with Drupal7 and Joomla. Some observation. It is very difficult to create web sites with Drupal7 and Joomla. It might be useful to a corporations but creating a simple website is a royal pain.

I further evaluated some Wiki software which could be used as CMS. Came down to two Tiki Wiki (monolitic written in PHP) and Foswiki (a free fork of TWiki) modular written in Perl.

I really like Foswiki and that would be my personal choice now. These are serious websites built with Foswiki